Appropriating the Internet for Global
Activism

In the quest for global peace and social justice, the
Internet and other emerging network technologies provide powerful tools
to support our work. But most organizations have not moved beyond
e-mail and basic websites—they haven't yet learned truly strategic uses
of these technologies. Put simply, the tools are in our hands, but most
of us have not yet decided what to build. Below, we present a glimpse
of what the future might hold based on our research on organizations
that are out front in their innovative use of these emerging
technologies.

Under
the hood, however, the London-based OneWorld is a very different kind
of site. It is a network of civil society content producers from around
the world all working to paint a collective picture of a better world.
Almost 100 percent of the content is drawn from the websites of
OneWorld's 1,500 partner sites. In creating “the news” for a particular
day, OneWorld editors pull the best material from this pool of partner
sites, write new headlines and précis, and publish the material to the
front page. At a global level, the coverage is in English. Regional
coverage in five additional languages is provided by more than 10
regional and country sites.

While most civil society
websites tell stories from a single organization's perspective,
OneWorld presents the perspective of multiple organizations according
to theme. The result is a diversity of opinion and content driven
directly by the work and interests of civil society organizations.

Indymedia—grassroots open publishingSince
starting as a single Web site and media production storefront set up
for the Seattle WTO protests in 1999, Indymedia has grown to more than
100 sites covering all continents. A single international site collects
the best content from all of the locals.

Indymedia
is among the best-known examples of open publishing. A typical local
Indymedia site consists of a “wire” section that automatically presents
open publishing material as it is posted to the site. In addition, the
site contains a “news” column consisting of stories chosen or written
by the local editorial team. Whether news or wire, all of these stories
come from grassroots media activists.

“While other
online alternative news sources often fill their Web pages with
editorials, commentaries, and news analysis,” writes Gene Hyde, in an
article published at www.firstmonday.org.
“Indymedia's primary emphasis is in providing a Web outlet for filing
original, first-hand coverage online through print, photos, audio, and
video.”

Biwater censorship case—online activismOnline
tactics can reverse corporate decisions in a few short days, as
business interests scramble to avoid negative press. A good civil
society example is the Biwater censorship case.

In
the late 1990s, Biwater, a privately owned British corporation
specializing in water privatization, tried to take control of a number
of water concessions in South Africa. This led to public criticisms
from the South African Municipal Workers Union, South Africa's Mail and
Guardian newspaper, the LabourNet.org website, and others.

In
April 1998, Biwater threatened legal action against the nonprofit
Internet service providers (ISPs) that hosted the LabourNet and Mail
and Guardian websites. Unable to afford an expensive legal battle, both
ISPs removed the material critical of Biwater.

The
removal of the pages turned out to be the beginning, not the end, of
the fight against Biwater. LabourNet webmaster Chris Baily called on
activists to use the Internet to fight back against BiWater's use of
restrictive libel laws to throttle democratic debate. Two European ISPs
dedicated to working with civil society — Antenna in the Netherlands
and Inform in Denmark — responded.

Antenna and
Inform, both member of the Association for Progressive Communications
(APC), mirrored the removed pages on their own servers. This meant that
the pages were still accessible to the public but they were no longer
housed within the British or South African jurisdictions where the
“cease and desist” orders had been served.

Another
eight APC members agreed to mirror the Biwater material, spreading the
articles across servers in Europe and the Americas. With so many groups
involved that were located in so many different countries, Biwater's
legal challenge became almost impossible. Biwater sent no more letters
on the issue.

Sarai/Waag—North/South collaborationThe
Sarai/Waag Exchange provides a good example of how two civil society
organizations—one from the North, the other from the South—use the
Internet to collaborate on an equal level. The Exchange is an
open-ended research partnership and series of fellowships aimed at
getting to know one another by being immersed in each others'
experiences, practices, and locality.

Sarai is a
Delhi-based new media initiative that explores the new media landscape
and seeks to change that landscape by organizing workshops and
developing media labs and community projects.

One
such project is the Cybermohalla computer centres, where people in the
poor neighborhoods of Delhi record and communicate what is going on
around them. “About 15 women and five men, most of them in their early
20s, turned barefoot journalists and report about their surroundings:
their basti of dust, makeshift houses, corrugated iron, mud walls,
narrow lanes, trading, smoking fires, noisy roosters, crying babies,
and playing children that is in constant danger of being bulldozed
because the entire settlement of a few thousand people is illegal,
whatever that means,” writes Michael Hegener in an article on
http://waag.sarai.net. “The main outlet of their work is a Hindi
newspaper posted on the walls that informs about the things the
passers-by may speak about, but about which they never read.”

The
Amsterdam-based Waag Society shares Sarai's interest in seeing media
from a variety of angles, carrying out research, developing software,
and pointing out the connections between technology and culture. The
Delhi and Amsterdam groups both have a passion for technology that is
“open source”—placed in the public domain so it is available for
anyone's use. This interest led the Exchange to hold an “open source
and development cooperation” workshop in Amsterdam during the summer of
2003 involving practitioners from both South and North.

“The
old aid model is nation to nation, for instance, Holland helps India,”
writes Hegener, quoting Ravi Sundaram of Sarai. “Now it is possible for
Waag Society and Sarai to collaborate at an equal level. We both learn
though the collaboration: we work together, set up events together. We
spoke little about the aid implications, the formal aspect. The most
important thing about the Exchange is that, for the first time, it is
possible to speak at an equal footing.”

The
potential of the Sarai/Waag Exchange is significant enough that others
have asked to join, and the partners have agreed to open it up—albeit
cautiously. Only one new organization — the Alternative Law Forum —
will be joining in 2004. If this goes well, another organization may
join in 2005.

Citizen Lab—detecting hackersAs
more civil society organizations go online, the importance of network
security increases. Citizen Lab is developing a Secure Scan research
project to help non-governmental non-profit organizations (NGOs) detect
hackers and improve security on their networks. It plans to investigate
the widespread anecdotal evidence that NGOs are being subjected to
hacker attacks.

Human rights organizations appear to
be especially likely to be targets of such attacks. For example, in
January 2001, the Argentine human rights group Las Madres de la Plaza
del Mayo reported being hacked for the third time and having
information destroyed on their hard drives. The attacks were attributed
to a group called Jorge Videla, the name of a military official who was
part of the 1976-1983 dictatorship that was responsible for the
disappearances of 15,000 to 30,000 people.

Citizen
Lab works with NGOs in the South, auditing their network security and
patching up any vulnerability. It plans to seek permission of the NGOs
to install tools that allows the network to be monitored and any
intrusion to be detected.

Exception, not the ruleIn
these organizations, we see a world where technology is at once central
and forgotten. E-mail lists, websites, and databases are so deeply
ingrained into the DNA of these organizations that they are no longer
the point or the problem. The fluidity and flexibility of these
technology tools have become the natural raw material from which more
important things are built – coalitions, campaigns, knowledge,
networks. They, in turn, create new forms of organization and ways of
working together that are changing the terrain of civil society and
giving a glimpse of an uncharted future. As this terrain starts to
emerge and come into focus, we see glimpses of the future.

Mark
Surman, president of Commons Group, has been developing leading-edge,
community-based media projects for the past 15 years. Katherine Reilly
is an independent researcher and consultant working on social and
political aspects of new technologies in Canada and Latin America.

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Adapted
from the report of the Information Technology and International
Cooperation Program of the Social Science Research Council. The full
report—which profiles civil society organizations that have
successfully appropriated the Internet and the challenges they continue
to face—can be downloaded at www.ssrc.org/programs/itic/.